Field of Invention
The present invention relates to new and improved methods of and apparatus for helping individuals, groups of individuals, as well as children and businesses alike, to create original music for various applications, without having special knowledge in music theory or practice, as generally required by prior art technologies.
Brief Overview of the State of Knowledge and Skill in the Art
It is very difficult for video and graphics art creators to find the right music for their content within the time, legal, and budgetary constraints that they face. Further, after hours or days searching for the right music, licensing restrictions, non-exclusivity, and inflexible deliverables often frustrate the process of incorporating the music into digital content. In their projects, content creators often use “Commodity Music” which is music that is valued for its functional purpose but, unlike “Artistic Music”, not for the creativity and collaboration that goes into making it.
Currently, the Commodity Music market is $3 billion and growing, due to the increased amount of content that uses Commodity Music being created annually, and the technology-enabled surge in the number of content creators. From freelance video editors, producers, and consumer content creators to advertising and digital branding agencies and other professional content creation companies, there has been an extreme demand for a solution to the problem of music discovery and incorporation in digital media.
Indeed, the use of computers and algorithms to help create and compose music has been pursued by many for decades, but not with any great success. In his 2000 landmark book, “The Algorithmic Composer,” David Cope surveyed the state of the art back in 2000, and described his progress in “algorithmic composition”, as he put it, including his progress developing his interactive music composition system called ALICE (ALgorithmically Integrated Composing Environment).
In this celebrated book, David Cope described how his ALICE system could be used to assist composers in composing and generating new music, in the style of the composer, and extract musical intelligence from prior music that has been composed, to provide a useful level of assistance which composers had not had before. David Cope has advanced his work in this field over the past 15 years, and his impressive body of work provides musicians with many interesting tools for augmenting their capacities to generate music in accordance with their unique styles, based on best efforts to extract musical intelligence from the artist's music compositions. However, such advancements have clearly fallen short of providing any adequate way of enabling non-musicians to automatically compose and generate unique pieces of music capable of meeting the needs and demands of the rapidly growing commodity music market.
Furthermore, over the past few decades, numerous music composition systems have been proposed and/or developed, employing diverse technologies, such as hidden Markov models, generative grammars, transition networks, chaos and self-similarity (fractals), genetic algorithms, cellular automata, neural networks, and artificial intelligence (AI) methods. While many of these systems seek to compose music with computer-algorithmic assistance, some even seem to compose and generate music in an automated manner.
However, the quality of the music produced by such automated music composition systems has been quite poor to find acceptable usage in commercial markets, or consumer markets seeking to add value to media-related products, special events and the like. Consequently, the dream for machines to produce wonderful music has hitherto been unfulfilled, despite the efforts by many to someday realize the same.
Consequently, many compromises have been adopted to make use of computer or machine assisted music composition suitable for use and sale in contemporary markets.
For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,754,959 entitled “System and Method of Automatically Creating An Emotional Controlled Soundtrack” by Herberger et al. (assigned to Magix AG) provides a system for enabling a user of digital video editing software to automatically create an emotionally controlled soundtrack that is matched in overall emotion or mood to the scenes in the underlying video work. As disclosed, the user will be able to control the generation of the soundtrack by positioning emotion tags in the video work that correspond to the general mood of each scene. The subsequent soundtrack generation step utilizes these tags to prepare a musical accompaniment to the video work that generally matches its on-screen activities, and which uses a plurality of prerecorded loops (and tracks) each of which has at least one musical style associated therewith. As disclosed, the moods associated with the emotion tags are selected from the group consisting of happy, sad, romantic, excited, scary, tense, frantic, contemplative, angry, nervous, and ecstatic. As disclosed, the styles associated with the plurality of prerecorded music loops are selected from the group consisting of rock, swing, jazz, waltz, disco, Latin, country, gospel, ragtime, calypso, reggae, oriental, rhythm and blues, salsa, hip hop, rap, samba, zydeco, blues and classical.
While the general concept of using emotion tags to score frames of media is compelling, the automated methods and apparatus for composing and generating pieces of music, as disclosed and taught by Herberger et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 7,754,959, is neither desirable or feasible in most environments and makes this system too limited for useful application in almost any commodity music market.
At the same time, there are a number of companies who are attempting to meet the needs of the rapidly growing commodity music market, albeit, without much success.
Overview of the XHail System by Score Music Interactive
In particular, Score Music Interactive (trading as Xhail) based in Market Square, Gorey, in Wexford County, Ireland provides the XHail system which allows users to create novel combinations of prerecorded audio loops and tracks, along the lines proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,754,959.
Currently available as beta web-based software, the XHail system allows musically-literate individuals to create unique combinations of pre-existing music loops, based on descriptive tags. To reasonably use the XHail system, a user must understand the music creation process, which includes, but is not limited to, (i) knowing what instruments work well when played together, (ii) knowing how the audio levels of instruments should be balanced with each other, (iii) knowing how to craft a musical contour with a diverse palette of instruments, (iv) knowing how to identifying each possible instrument or sound and audio generator, which includes, but is not limited to, orchestral and synthesized instruments, sound effects, and sound wave generators, and (v) possessing standard or average level of knowledge in the field of music.
While the XHail system seems to combine pre-existing music loops into internally-novel combinations at an abrupt pace, much time and effort is required in order to modify the generated combination of pre-existing music loops into an elegant piece of music. Additional time and effort is required to sync the music combination to a pre-existing video. As the XHail system uses pre-created “music loops” as the raw material for its combination process, it is limited by the quantity of loops in its system database and by the quality of each independently created music loop. Further, as the ownership, copyright, and other legal designators of original creativity of each loop are at least partially held by the independent creators of each loop, and because XHail does not control and create the entire creation process, users of the XHail system have legal and financial obligations to each of its loop creators each time a pre-exiting loop is used in a combination.
While the XHail system appears to be a possible solution to music discovery and incorporation, for those looking to replace a composer in the content creation process, it is believed that those desiring to create Artistic Music will always find an artist to create it and will not forfeit the creative power of a human artist to a machine, no matter how capable it may be. Further, the licensing process for the created music is complex, the delivery materials are inflexible, an understanding of music theory and current music software is required for full understanding and use of the system, and perhaps most importantly, the XHail system has no capacity to learn and improve on a user-specific and/or user-wide basis.
Overview of the Scorify System by Jukedeck
The Scorify System by Jukedeck based in London, England, and founded by Cambridge graduates Ed Rex and Patrick Stobbs, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate unique, copyright-free pieces of music for everything from YouTube videos to games and lifts. The Scorify system allows video creators to add computer-generated music to their video. The Scorify System is limited in the length of pre-created video that can be used with its system. Scorify's only user inputs are basic style/genre criteria. Currently, Scorify's available styles are: Techno, Jazz, Blues, 8-Bit, and Simple, with optional sub-style instrument designation, and general music tempo guidance. By requiring users to select specific instruments and tempo designations, the Scorify system inherently requires its users to understand classical music terminology and be able to identify each possible instrument or sound and audio generator, which includes, but is not limited to, orchestral and synthesized instruments, sound effects, and sound wave generators.
The Scorify system lacks adequate provisions that allow any user to communicate his or her desires and/or intentions, regarding the piece of music to be created by the system. Further, the audio quality of the individual instruments supported by the Scorify system remains well below professional standards.
Further, the Scorify system does not allow a user to create music independently of a video, to create music for any media other than a video, and to save or access the music created with a video independently of the content with which it was created.
While the Scorify system appears to provide an extremely elementary and limited solution to the market's problem, the system has no capacity for learning and improving on a user-specific and/or user-wide basis. Also, the Scorify system and music delivery mechanism is insufficient to allow creators to create content that accurately reflects their desires and there is no way to edit or improve the created music, either manually or automatically, once it exists.
Overview of the SonicFire Pro System by SmartSound
The SonicFire Pro system by SmartSound out of Beaufort, S.C., USA allows users to purchase and use pre-created music for their video content. Currently available as a web-based and desktop-based application, the SonicFire Pro System provides a Stock Music Library that uses pre-created music, with limited customizability options for its users. By requiring users to select specific instruments and volume designations, the SonicFire Pro system inherently requires its users to have the capacity to (i) identify each possible instrument or sound and audio generator, which includes, but is not limited to, orchestral and synthesized instruments, sound effects, and sound wave generators, and (ii) possess professional knowledge of how each individual instrument should be balanced with every other instrument in the piece. As the music is pre-created, there are limited “Variations” options to each piece of music. Further, because each piece of music is not created organically (i.e. on a note-by-note and/or chord/by-chord basis) for each user, there is a finite amount of music offered to a user. The process is relatively arduous and takes a significant amount of time in selecting a pre-created piece of music, adding limited-customizability features, and then designating the length of the piece of music.
The SonicFire Pro system appears to provide a solution to the market, limited by the amount of content that can be created, and a floor below which the price which the previously-created music cannot go for economic sustenance reasons. Further, with a limited supply of content, the music for each user lacks uniqueness and complete customizability. The SonicFire Pro system does not have any capacity for self-learning or improving on a user-specific and/or user-wide basis. Moreover, the process of using the software to discover and incorporate previously created music can take a significant amount of time, and the resulting discovered music remains limited by stringent licensing and legal requirements, which are likely to be created by using previously-created music.
Other Stock Music Libraries
Stock Music Libraries are collections of pre-created music, often available online, that are available for license. In these Music Libraries, pre-created music is usually tagged with relevant descriptors to allow users to search for a piece of music by keyword. Most glaringly, all stock music (sometimes referred to as “Royalty Free Music”) is pre-created and lacks any user input into the creation of the music. Users must browse what can be hundreds and thousands of individual audio tracks before finding the appropriate piece of music for their content.
Additional examples of stock music containing and exhibiting very similar characteristics, capabilities, limitations, shortcomings, and drawbacks of SmartSound's SonicFire Pro System, include, for example, Audio Socket, Free Music Archive, Friendly Music, Rumble Fish, and Music Bed.
The prior art described above addresses the market need for Commodity Music only partially, as the length of time to discover the right music, the licensing process and cost to incorporate the music into content, and the inflexible delivery options (often a single stereo audio file) serve as a woefully inadequate solution.
Further, the requirement of a certain level of music theory background and/or education adds a layer of training necessary for any content creator to use the current systems to their full potential.
Moreover, the prior art systems described above are static systems that do not learn, adapt, and self-improve as they are used by others, and do not come close to offering “white glove” service comparable to that of the experience of working with a professional composer.
In view, therefore, of the prior art and its shortcomings and drawbacks, there is a great need in the art for new and improved information processing systems and methods that enable individuals, as well as other information systems, without possessing any musical knowledge, theory or expertise, to automatically compose and generate music pieces for use in scoring diverse kinds of media products, as well as supporting and/or celebrating events, organizations, brands, families and the like as the occasion may suggest or require, while overcoming the shortcomings and drawbacks of prior art systems, methods and technologies.